A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 9: The Attack in the Coombe Abbey Woods

This is episode 9 in a series of posts researching the mystery of the dramatic life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

The winter of 1449-1450 was brutal.  It came early, in October, bringing heavy snows and killing the olive trees in France.  Three days after the new year, Sir Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, Constable of England, Knight of the Garter and his retinue were riding through the Coombe Abbey woods when they were set upon and ambushed by twenty-six men armed with long bows, cross bows, spears and swords.  The attackers were “jacketed,” (presumably wearing brigandines or gambesons) and wore helmets.  Even today the woods are close and if they were the same in the snowy January of 1450, they would have been treacherous.  The attackers’ goal was to murder the Duke, the plan simply to shoot him down on the path as he rode by.  It was unlikely to fail.

Yet, by miracle the Duke and his followers escaped totally unharmed.  Perhaps, the woods had been cleared to either side at that place to prevent just such attacks, as some statutes required , although why then would the attackers have chosen that place?  Perhaps, the attackers were simply incompetent although at least one of their number, their leader,  probably was not.  He was a veteran of the French wars and a knight in his late forties, Sir Thomas Malory.

What is stranger still is what happened immediately after:  nothing.  Eighteen days later, both the Duke of Buckingham and Sir Thomas Malory, who’d attacked him, sat in Parliament.  There is no record of either speaking or acting on the attack at that time.  This is particularly surprising in the context of what had happened nineteen months before.  The same Duke of Buckingham and his son Richard, in Coventry for the Mystery Plays, had encountered Sir Robert Harcourt and his followers in the street.  They had argued and come to blows.  Buckingham’s son Richard was knifed in the back and killed by one of Harcourt’s servants, John Aleyn.  Harcourt, Aleyn and several others were indicted that same day.

Is it possible the attack by Malory and 26 others never happened?  Why would a modest middle-aged Warwickshire knight stage a surprise attack on one of the most powerful magnates in the land who, by the way, often traveled with a retinue four times his accused attacker’s numbers?  Why was Buckingham riding through the Coombe Abbey woods in dead of winter?  Whether or not the attack occurred, Malory’s indictment for the incident 15 month later is the beginning of his great legal troubles which led to his imprisonment.

Christina Hardyment in The Knight Who Became King Arthur’s Chronicler offers a third possibility.  Buckingham had a history of using brute force as well as politics to extend his power in Warwickshire.  For example, on September 23, 1449, the day elections were announced, eighty of his men assaulted Thomas Ferrers of Groby and attempted to break into his castle to get at Ferrers’ father, the Sheriff of Staffordshire and it worked:  two of his supporters were subsequently elected for Staffordshire.  Was Buckingham attempting a similar intimidation of a minor knight in Warwickshire on that January 4^th when he encountered surprising, organized resistance that forced him to back down and, consequently, possibly loose face?

You can find episode 10 here.

(Details of the winter of 1449-1450 are from Des Changements dans le Climat de la France, Histoire de ses Révolutions Météorologiques, Paris, 1845 by Joseph-Jean-Nicolas Fuster)

(Orson Wells as Falstaff in “Chimes at Midnight”)

A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 5: Into the Forest

When we lived in Massachusetts we walked in the Weston Woods that were close by.  The conservation lands were dense and diverse with White and Pitch Pine, Black Maple, and full of brush:  Hairy Wood Mint, Green Dragon, Prickly Rose and occasional Dwarf Mistletoe.  The trails were sometimes ambiguous, especially when featureless clouds deprived us of any sense of direction from the sun.  It was very different from hiking in the mountains of the west where the only problems are avoiding occasional snakes or bears or finding a way down.  The Weston Woods was the first place I was ever properly lost.

And the Weston Woods are small.  The woods of medieval England were vast.  I suspect T. H. White had it right when he characterized them as wild, dangerous places.  I’ve hiked in the Amazon rain forest.  There even trees are aggressive:  they want to poison you or enable their symbiotic insects to bite you so that you’ll die over their roots and provide nourishment.  I expect the woods of 15^th century England were a bit like that.

The second probable reference to Thomas Malory’s young life is in the Codnor muster roll, dated March 1^st, 1418.  Actually, two Thomas Malory’s are listed.  Field barely mentions it and suggests they’re the same person; Hardyment interprets the first to be the author’s uncle who died shortly thereafter and the second to be the author himself.  Record keeping in the 15^th century was notoriously irregular, nevertheless, muster rolls had important, formal consequences, particularly payment.  While documenting ghost soldiers was a common ruse for fraud, including the same name on a single roll seems a bit much even by 15^th century standards. I concur with Hardyment: there were two.  She then takes a large leap.  She posits that Malory probably accompanied Henry on his second great campaign between 1417 and 1420 and the seminal experiences Malory had then led to his deep interest in Chivalry.  I was skeptical until I thought about my own uncles, and Lynn’s father, who fought in World War II and their attitude about going.

One uncle even lied about his age and enlisted when he was fifteen.  They saw it as the great adventure of their time which they couldn’t bear to miss.  Henry V’s second invasion was much the same.  In that context and given his social position, it seems more likely Thomas Malory was with Henry than not.

Hardyment’s description of Henry V’s second campaign was a real pleasure.  I haven’t read a more engaging narrative of a period of Henry V’s life after Agincourt which is often given short shrift.  It compares very favorably with Ian Mortimer and Juliet Barker, which is no small praise.  Most importantly, she conveys the scope, the cultural importance and logistical complexity of the undertaking.

Yet that leads to a problem that has moved to the top of my list: why does Malory himself deal so casually with the complexity of medieval warfare and medieval life in general?  Peter Hoskins detailed memoir of hiking the Black Prince’s Poitiers campaign and describing in detail how the French countryside has changed since the 1350s gives you an immediate sense of the problem, yet Malory is remarkably casual about it.  His knights easily take horse, “dress their shields,” “couch their spears” and are off into the forest (those forests) for adventure.  But it wasn’t that easy.  Part of the answer, I know, is that Malory was translating older works.  But even early on he emends his sources to deal with issues such as Pellinore’s rape of Sir Tor’s mother to bring them more into alignment with his own probable Chivalric values.  If he was with Henry V, the Chivalric world he observed was very rich and complex indeed.

A curious personal aspect of this endeavor are the forgotten memories it’s wakened.  When I was about 5 years old, my uncle, the one who had enlisted in the Navy at 15, managed a lumber mill and for Christmas made amazing wood swords for my cousins and me.  The slightly swirled hilts were particularly fine.  Yet mine sat forgotten in a corner of my room until one day the following summer when I went outside and discovered a gang of neighborhood boys, mostly older than me, making crude wooden swords out of disused one-by-twos and playing at knights using aluminum garbage can lids.  I ran back in, found my own sword and went back out and grabbed our garbage can lid so that I could join them.  You’d have thought I’d brought Excalibur out to play.

Later, when I was called home for lunch the gang had moved far up the wooded street.  Now when I think of the boys scrapping in the distant yards and street under the trees I see bright surcoats, pennoncels and polished helms. 

We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.  A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.  So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

                                           Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot

As I write this I’m listening to “Forest” by the composer/cellist Zoe Keating.

Episode 6 is here

A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 3: 1401

There is a lesson I’ve learned at least twice:  first, when I was first doing Mathematics seriously and again when I returned to fencing.  The lesson is to be particularly wary of what you want to be true.  In Maths, you’ll have an algorithm or a strategy for proving a theorem that seems so good, so natural, so clever, it has to work.  But it doesn’t and it can keep  you for days or months from seeing the less attractive or essentially more complicated route which is necessary to solve the problem.  In fencing, beware the opponent who makes that one perfect, subtle mistake which happens to fit your best attack.  It’s a bait, not a mistake and he’ll kill you with it.

This is the third episode reporting on my personal quest to make sense of the eccentric and dramatic life of Sir Thomas Malory and his great work Le Morte d’Arthur.  The immediate question I’m facing is whether he was born in 1415 (Field 1993) or 1401 (Hardyment 2004).  The particular evidence in question, referenced by both, is William Dugdale’s assertion in his 1656 history of Warwickshire that Malory served in the retinue of the Earl of Warwick at the siege of Calais in King Henry V’s time.

More than one Thomas Malory is mentioned in the extant early 15^th century records.  Field’s careful, detailed chapter summarizes all ten references and offers a self-acknowledged “risky” hypothesis that they refer to 3 different men.  Most importantly, he notes that with the exception of the siege of Calais reference, none specifically refer to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, the author.  Field then turns to demographic evidence.  Malory’s father was born in 1385, his mother about 1380, making them 15 and 20 respectively when Thomas was born.  Further, in 1437, Malory’s mother is formally named executrix of Malory’s father from which Field infers that Sir Thomas was a still a minor and hence couldn’t have been born in 1401.  If Malory, was born in 1401 he would have written Le Morte d’Arthur in his sixties.  On that point Field quotes George Lyman Kittredge, “Nothing is impossible but…recalling the vitality, energy and even occasional gaiety of Le Morte Darthur and the long, persistent labor that it represents, one needs hardly to be skeptical to doubt that the work was written by an ancient of seventy-five.”  Field’s solution:  throw out Dugdale’s controversial evidence. The Thomas Malory in the muster roll was a different Thomas Malory.  Dugdale wasn’t as careful an historian as he should have been.

Convinced?  Ready to make that lunge to the exposed shoulder?

Hardyment disagrees.  She accepts that Dugdale was referring to the right Sir Thomas Malory, argues convincingly that a timeline commencing with a birth in 1401 is far from the realm of possibility and, indeed that some of the later events make better sense in the context of the earlier date.  She writes,

“…(Field’s) book makes Malory’s life more, not less mystifying.  It does not explain the emergence of a clever, forceful writer who evidently had ideals for which he was willing to risk his life, a man whom the Lancastrian King Henry VI feared enough to imprison without trial for almost a decade, and who was one of a tiny handful of men excluded from pardon by Henry’s usurping Yorkist successor, Edward IV.  To achieve this, Malory’s birth needs to be returned to around 1400.”

Convinced?  Ready to make that lunge to the exposed shoulder?

Actually, I am, with qualifications, but I wouldn’t expect you to be:  these are imperfect summaries of the authors’ arguments, not the arguments themselves.  But here’s my view.  Field’s chapter on Malory’s birth does good service in presenting the details of the contemporary references.  But they are insufficient and not all pertinent for deciding Dugdale’s Calais siege reference is to someone other than Sir Thomas Malory, the author.  The most compelling aspects of Field’s argument, the absence of other specific references to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in 1400-1415 and his mother’s acting as executrix in 1437 for his father can be rationalized as easily as Field rationalizes his alternative timeline.

William Dugdale’s book is remarkably carefully written and illustrated.  He documents the lost church windows of All Saints Grendon which depicted Sir Thomas Malory’s parents, for example.  He may even have seen parish records, now lost, documenting Malory’s birth though he doesn’t say so.  Field’s assertion that Dugdale incorrectly attributed the Calais siege reference to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell requires stronger justification.  At the worst, Field is editing his data to fit his hypothesis.

So, I’m going with 1401 as Malory’s birth year whilst keeping an eye out for further evidence supporting or contradicting it.  (For example, a larkish superficial search of Newgate prison records turned up nothing.)

A few final comments, the longer and more carefully I read Hardyment, the more impressed I am with her biography at multiple levels and would highly recommend it  which means of course I’ll be reading her with continued care and skepticism as I continue.  And, I must express appreciation to the Dugdale Society of Stratford-upon-Avon for their assistance in deciphering dates and genealogical tables in his book.

The fine and terrible mystery continues, of course.  I have a yellow legal pad filling with scrawled questions, such as why wasn’t Sir Thomas included in the windows of All Saints Grendon?  Why didn’t William Dugdale note that Sir Thomas was the author of Le Morte d’Arthur?

In As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields I made use of my favorite quote of Henry of Grosmont, the 1^st Duke of Lancaster and his words come back to me now.  He wrote in his memoir Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines:  “All of us only want three things in life: to be praised, then loved, then lost."

Episode 4 is here